On the Dolphins-Broncos Blowout: History Favors Denver for One Week

If you are the wagering type, you should take the Denver Broncos -3 against the Chicago Bears in Week 4.

No one is saying that the Broncos will turn things around in any meaningful way in 2023, that Russell Wilson will not get benched sometime before Thanksgiving or that Sean Payton’s blood pressure won’t go Krakatoa and lead to a firing spree and/or resignation. It’s just that the history of 50-point blowouts is on the Broncos’ side, at least for one week. (Also, the Bears are somehow in worse shape than the Broncos. But mostly the history part.)

Since the 1999 season, five teams were blown out by 50-plus points before the Miami Dolphins devastated the Broncos 70-20 on Sunday. Those losers went 4-1 in their next games, albeit with some extenuating circumstances like bye weeks.

Reduce the blowout criteria to 48 points and we get three more epic thumpings in the 21st century. The recipients of those thumpings went 2-1 in their next games, 3-0 against the spread. That brings the recipients of historically humiliating defeats to 7-1 ATS in recent history.

That may not be a trend worth wagering the 401K on, but c’mon: you know that Payton and the Broncos veterans will work hard to regain a shred of dignity (Wilson is visualizing victory high-5s in an empty hallway of his mansion right now) and that the Bears are lucky to string two first downs together these days.

It’s much harder to make any short-range predictions about the Dolphins, who travel to face the Bills in Buffalo for their toughest test of the 2023 season. Winners are 3-2 after 50-point blowouts. Most of the teams that engineered 50-point blowouts in this millennium have been very good, but is there any doubt that the Dolphins are a very good team?

What Blowout History Teaches Us About the Broncos and Dolphins

The recent history of 50-point blowouts is fascinating. Both Payton and Wilson have been party to them in the past. So has Jeff Fisher, a little too frequently. Let’s journey through the past to determine if we can glean anything from epic blowouts besides wagering advice for Week 4’s most depressing game.

St. Louis Rams 52, Oakland Raiders 0: November 30, 2014

Quarterback Matchup: Shaun Hill vs. Derek Carr
Coach Matchup: Jeff Fisher vs. Tony Sparano

The Next Week: The Raiders bounced back to beat the 49ers 24-13. The Rams beat Washington 24-0, then lost their last three games of the season because, well, go back and look at their coach and quarterback.

Aftermath for the Loser: Sparano was an interim coach; Dennis Allen had been fired a few weeks earlier. Carr was a rookie. The briefly interesting Jack Del Rio era began in 2015.

Aftermath for the Winner: The Rams finished 6-10 under Fisher in 2014, then 7-9 under Fisher in 2015, then Fisher got fired soon after the team moved to Los Angeles in 2016. That 52-0 blowout appears to have been just one of those things that happens now and then.

Seattle Seahawks 58, Arizona Cardinals 0: December 9, 2012

Quarterback Matchup: Russell Wilson vs. John Skelton
Coach Matchup: Pete Carroll vs. Ken Whisenhunt

The Next Week: The Cardinals beat the Lions 38-10 with rookie Ryan Lindley replacing Skelton, then lost their last two games of the season; that victory was the only win of Lindley’s career. The Seahawks won their last three games and reached the divisional round of the playoffs.

Aftermath for the Loser: Whisenhunt and general manager Rod Graves were fired in place of Bruce Arians and Steve Keim. Carson Palmer took over at quarterback. The Cardinals were really good for a few years.

Aftermath for the Winner: They won the Super Bowl after the 2013 season. Wilson’s journey led straight to this feature.

New Orleans Saints 62, Indianapolis Colts 7: October 23, 2011

Quarterback Matchup: Drew Brees vs. Curtis Painter
Coach Matchup: Sean Payton vs. Jim Caldwell

The Next Week: The Colts lost their next game 27-10 to the Titans, then lost five more. They were the only team to lose the week after a 50-point blowout. The Colts were upset by the A.J. Feeley-led Rams, then won eight straight games to reach the playoffs.

Aftermath for the Loser: This was the year Peyton Manning missed with a neck injury. Caldwell and general manager Chris Polian gave way to Chuck Pagano and Ryan Grigson. The Colts drafted Andrew Luck and started over. They’ve been starting over ever since.

Aftermath for the Winner: The BountyGate scandal occurred the next season. Remember that? Anyway, the Payton/Brees Saints actually entered a lull for a few years after Payton’s one-year suspension before becoming perennial contenders again late in the 2010s.

New England Patriots 59, Tennessee Titans 0: October 18, 2009

Quarterback Matchup: Tom Brady vs. Kerry Collins
Coach Matchup: Bill Belichick vs. Jeff Fisher

The Next Week: After a bye, the Titans, who were 0-6 after this loss, replaced Collins with Vince Young, beat the Jaguars 30-13 and went 8-2 down the stretch so Fisher could finish perfectly 8-8. The Patriots beat the Buccaneers 35-7.

Aftermath for the Loser: Fisher, who led the Titans to a 13-3 record one year earlier, lasted one more season. Young turned out to be wildly inconsistent.

Aftermath for the Winner: Brady and the Patriots were already Brady and the Patriots, and would remain Brady and the Patriots for many years to come. Oddly enough, this was one of their weakest seasons: Brady was just back from his ACL tear and neither the offense nor defense was operating at peak capacity.

Jacksonville Jaguars 62, Miami Dolphins 7, January 15th, 2000

Quarterback Matchup: Mark Brunell vs. Dan Marino
Coach Matchup: Tom Coughlin vs. Jimmy Johnson

The Next Week: This was a playoff game. Johnson resigned as the Dolphins coach/emperor the next day, handing the reins to top lieutenant Dave Wannstedt. Marino, 38 years old and coming off a shaky season, retired.

The Jaguars fell to the Titans, coached by (you guessed it) Jeff Fisher, in the AFC Championship game.

Aftermath for the loser: See above. The Wannstedt/Jay Fiedler Dolphins, with their Johnson-built roster, went 11-5 for two straight years. They shut out the Seahawks 23-0 in the 2000 season opener.

Aftermath for the winner: This victory was the last hurrah for the excellent Jaguars teams of the late 1990s. The Jaguars tripped out of the gate in 2000 and embarked on several dismal seasons under Coughlin, who was not a fun guy to work for when things weren’t going well.

More Blowouts, and the Decade Without Blowouts

MIAMI GARDENS, FLORIDA - SEPTEMBER 24: Justin Bethel #20 of the Miami Dolphins tackles Russell Wilson #3 of the Denver Broncos during the third quarter at Hard Rock Stadium on September 24, 2023 in Miami Gardens, Florida. (Photo by Megan Briggs/Getty Images) — How can Denver redeem itself after a devastating loss to Miami on Sunday?Megan Briggs/Getty Images

Before the Jaguars-Dolphins playoff massacre, the NFL went a full decade without a 50-point blowout. There were no such games in the 1990s and just three in the 1980s. Strategies of the era dictated handing off and chewing up the clock with even a modest lead, which probably limited the number of truly lopsided wins.

Go back to the low-scoring 1970s, and the recipients of such blowouts tended to be the severely mismanaged teams of the era, like the Saints, Falcons or early-‘70s Patriots, who were sometimes running their teams on a shoestring. This was the era when some owners ran the draft with a Street & Smith’s College Football Annual in one hand and a bourbon in the other while the Cowboys showed up with a computer the size of a guest bedroom. So naturally there were severe thumpings now and then.

Lower the criteria to 48-point blowouts and we find three more lopsided laughers:

The forgettable 2012 Titans got trounced 55-7 by Aaron Rodgers and the Packers. Those Titans, coached by Mike Munchak and not Jeff Fisher, beat the Jaguars 38-20 the next week.

The Packers also defeated the Hurricane Katrina-impacted 2005 Saints 52-3 in October, when the city of New Orleans was still very much in a state of crisis. The Saints lost (but covered, he wrote, feeling like a ghoul for mentioning it even 18 years later) 34-31 to the Falcons the following week “at home” in San Antonio. That Packers blowout marked Rodgers’s NFL debut; he relieved Brett Favre in garbage time.

Finally, the Chiefs destroyed a Jake Plummer-led Cardinals team 49-0 late in the 2002 season. The Cardinals beat the Lions 23-20 in overtime the following week. The Cardinals kept head coach Dave McGinnis but replaced Plummer with Jeff Blake, which was a tiny bit like keeping Josh McDaniels but replacing Derek Carr with Jimmy Garoppolo.

Hot Take: Dolphins Good, Broncos Bad

Here are some final takeaways from today’s history lesson.

Quality coaches like Jimmy Johnson and Jeff Fisher sometimes get blown out by 50 points. Yes, Fisher is a “quality” coach by the standards of history. No coach was fired directly after such an embarrassment. Several were fired at year’s end, but none of them had Payton’s pedigree or were in the first years of their tenures. (Johnson resigned and hand-picked his successor, which is different).

Teams that lose blowouts don’t quit for good, no matter how ready they may look for tea time/tee time in the fourth quarter of their debacle. Teams with decent personnel (like the Broncos) pull themselves together a bit after getting hammered. The teams that do fall completely apart usually have a good reason, like an injury to a Hall of Fame quarterback or a real-world disaster.

Fifty-point victories say little about the winners except that they are good. The 2009 Patriots make this list, not the 2007 team that went 17-0 in the regular season. The 2011 Seahawks make this list, not the 2012 Super Bowl champions. The Jaguars who crushed the Dolphins in the playoffs were in decline, not on the rise. The Dolphins didn’t just punch a ticket to the Super Bowl; they may have iced a playoff appearance, but they could have done that with a 28-14 win.

Huge blowouts often lead to quarterback changes. Collins gave way to Young, Marino retired, the Cardinals and Colts pursued Palmer and Luck as soon as their seasons ended. The losers of the 48-point blowouts all changed quarterbacks the next season. Only Carr, a rookie taking his lumps, held onto his job for the long haul after a historic defeat.

That last bullet point suggests that the Wilson Era is about to come to an inglorious end in Denver, despite Wilson theoretically playing better this year than last. That may be obvious, but just about everything about a 50-point blowout is obvious. Except for one thing: the loser usually enjoys a very brief bounceback. So take the Broncos in Week 4, and then forget about them until they start making changes.